


Line and level

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, References to Shakespeare, School, Theatre, Unresolved Sexual Tension
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-01
Updated: 2014-08-01
Packaged: 2018-02-11 06:33:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2057568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>School Certificate play, 1930.  The Matric. Board has prescribed <i>The Tempest</i>. Dressing-up ensues.</p><p>Content advisory: an intellectual-disability related slur, some implied hostility to effeminacy, though probably less than you'd think from the character tag.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Line and level

**Author's Note:**

> Very roughly in the vicinity of [this prompt](http://renaultx.dreamwidth.org/4315.html?thread=12251#cmt12251) on the [RenaultX prompt meme](http://renaultx.dreamwidth.org/4315.html).

Lanyon―Hugh reflected it was past time he should be thinking of him as _Ralph_ , since it was the convention that one addressed the boys with whom one shared a study by their Christian names, and unsettlingly, that Somers had become _Jim_ within days of the beginning of term, but four weeks later, Lanyon was still Lanyon―listened to the proposal without expression.

‘No.  Find someone else.’  Lanyon leaned out of the armchair, took up the tongs, selected a large glossy lump and placed it deliberately on the fire. It was early in October to light one, and Hugh could feel sweat springing around his hairline and under his collar. But a privilege was a privilege, and theirs was one of only a handful of studies that still had an open fireplace, most of them having been replaced by gas. 

‘It’s only seven lines,’ Hugh wheedled.

‘See sense. I’d have to leave the lighting desk, go down around through the foyer and backstage, get changed, made up―it would take half of Act 3.’

‘Well, Kempe’s going to be in the box anyway, in case of fire.  He can take over for a minute.  You’d change and do make-up beforehand, with everybody else.’

‘No.  Lighting and sound for your potty little play I will do.  Lighting and sound in full greasepaint, blue silk and peacock feathers, I will not.  Here, I’ve rather a good idea for the masque, anyway, if we’re not allowed to cut it.’

‘Kempe says not.  We can trim speeches to get it in under two-and-a-half hours, but there’s no scholarly benefit doing it at all if we don’t preserve the shape of the play, he says.’

‘Scholarly benefit,’  Lanyon said derisively.  ‘Damn and blast the Matric. Board.  _The Tempest_.  Why couldn’t we have _Macbeth_ , or _Julius Caesar_ , or something sensible? They’ve always been good enough in the past.  _Hamlet_ , even.’

‘Girls’ schools, I suppose.’

‘ _What_?’

‘Well, _Julius Caesar_ must be a bit of a bind to put on with only girls.’

‘Oh, Hugh.  The things you do say.’  He looked down to see that Lanyon was smiling mischievously, folding his hands behind his head and arching his back.  Hugh hurriedly affected interest in a picture postcard propped on the chimney-piece, and finding it was of Donatello’s bronze David, fixed upon the fireside companion set, a horrific brass thing shaped like a galleon that Jim had for some reason thought amusing to the tune of half a crown in a Winchester junk shop.

‘What’s your idea for the masque, then?’

‘Well, it’s all fairly shy-making, isn’t it?  No-one wants to be on stage for that.  Nymphs and reapers, _foison increase, present fancy_ and all that.  What the hell is _foison_ anyway?  Sounds repulsive. So―lanterns, and noises off; like the tempest at the beginning, but cheery and pastoral.  And I could actually boom down Juno’s lines from the box, if I absolutely must.  My falsetto’s _execrable_ , by the way.  I shan’t demonstrate.’

‘Oh, that would be rather good.  Except―’

‘Except what?’  Lanyon sighed.

‘Well, Kempe’s got some of the twirps to act Iris and Ceres.  And he’s already told them to learn the lines.’

‘Oh, _God_.  Well, sorry, my dear fellow.  That does it.  I’m not frisking about on stage with the grubby-necked, inky-fingered denizens of the Remove.’

‘But―look here, L―Ralph.  There isn’t anyone.  I’ve tried.’

‘What do you mean?  There are heaps of us.’

‘But not who can fit into the―costume.’

‘And what makes you think I can?’

To ask a man to comment on another’s physique in that way, Hugh thought, was utterly unreasonable.  ‘Well―you’re―’

‘Strait as the gate and narrow as the way?’

Hugh blushed a deep claret and exacerbated a raw, pimply patch on his chin.  ‘Slim,’ he coughed.  ‘Look.  Try it on, and if it doesn’t―we’ll have to get someone else, won’t we?’

‘I suppose if it would put me out of the running―you mean here? _Now_?  Are you out of your bloody _mind_?’ 

‘I’ll watch the door.’

‘Hugh, people don’t come in through the _door_.’

‘Well―’ Hearing a fortuitous clamour of junior voices outside, Hugh went to the window, pushed it open, leaned out and whistled.

‘What the hell are you―’

‘Hi!  You!  Whoever you are.’

The boy came up to the window. ‘Odell, L.P., please, Treviss.’

‘Right, Odell, L.P., stand there, that’s it, by the window, and if anyone tries to come in here, stop him.’

The child’s hazel eyes grew very wide.  ‘How, Treviss, please?’

‘Oh, for Christ’s sake.  Do your people keep a housemaid?’

‘Yes, Treviss.’

‘Right, and when callers come and Mrs Odell doesn’t want to see them, what does the maid say?’

‘That she’s not at home, please, Treviss.’

‘Not quite a moron, good. So Somers, Treviss and―Lanyon are _not at home_.’  Jim was occupied with the House XV, that wouldn’t pose a problem. ‘Say it.’

Odell mouthed it back.

‘Oh, and Odell?’

‘Yes, Treviss?’

‘Don’t turn round.  On any account whatever.  More than your life’s worth, you understand?’  

‘Yes, please, Treviss.’

Hugh pushed the window to, and drew the curtain, then turned back to a Lanyon incredulous―he realised, to shattering relief―with amusement.

‘Bloody hell, Hugh. I never thought you had the neck.’  The expression he used was a good deal coarser.

‘Chop chop, we can’t keep the little beggar standing sentry forever.’  He averted his eyes for a suitable interval, staring fixedly at the green baize back of the door, dimly wondering why this occasion seemed to demand an elaborate modesty that changing-room and bathhouse did not.

‘Are you? I’ll do you up―oh, hell, no.’  The imperturbable Lanyon had become a cyclone of rippling halcyon blue above slender, high-arched feet and legs just a trace too muscular to be called scrawny, still a pale shade of the honey-and-sand of summer.  Hugh swallowed. 

‘Ralph―stop it.  Keep still, for God’s sake.  You’ll have it in shreds.’  Giggles overtook him.  ‘Drop it back over your head, that’s it.’  A mutinous light blue glare emerged, and meeting Hugh’s mirth, broke into a perverse, off-kilter smile. 

‘Now, _step_ into it, pull up, straps over your shoulders―’

‘Voice. Down.’  Ralph pointed desperately at the window.

‘All right, he won’t have a clue.  Turn about, there’s a good chap.  There are rather a lot of these hook and eye things―’

Hugh had done something like this for his sister, one summer, when he was six years old.  There had been a house-party, a fortnight when the maids were in demand for the female visitors who hadn’t their own, and Susannah, at the bottom of the womanly pecking-order, dressed herself each evening.  It had been a treat, to be allowed into her room, with its pale fine muslins and ninons, its sweetpea scent, for what she called the _finishing touches_.  He’d watch her take the papers from and brush out her shingled hair, apply a very polite modicum of lipstick and rouge, powder her face, take off her dressing-gown, and step into her evening dress.  She’d look over her shoulder, and say _do me up, Hughie_ , crouching until she was nearly sitting on her heels so he could reach the top buttons. He took pride in the deftness with which he could _do her up_ , never missing a button or putting one in the wrong loop, and delight in the feel of the soft material as it brushed his bare legs and puddled on his feet.  Susannah had worn so many undergarments that she seemed almost fully dressed before her gown was on; he’d never seen more of her bare flesh than did every guest at dinner.  

But this proved rather different.  Ralph’s back was naked to the waistband of his underpants, a long V of smooth boy’s skin just starting to coarsen into a man’s.  He smelled of pink washroom soap and salty new sweat.  Proximity suppressed hilarity very effectively, however; above all it became imperative that his fingertips did not so much as graze the straight, stiffly-held spine.  Hugh had to kneel to fasten the lowest clasps; as he worked his way up Ralph pulled back his shoulders nervously, and he perceived both unusual strength for a person so slight―Ralph had played for the 2nd XI last summer, not unheard-of, but precocious, and had prodigiously distinguished himself to the point that he was tipped for the 1st this year―and vulnerability in the lean musculature and prominent shoulderblades.  _Ariel_ , he thought idiotically, embarrassing himself from a bar already set high.

‘Bad luck, old boy.  It fits like a dream.’

Ralph smoothed the skirt with his palms and threw his head back with an explosive fricative noise.

‘Fuck you, Treviss.  Fuck you.’

Hugh very nearly threw up his fists by instinct.  He was taller and heavier than Ralph, but he’d lost enough bouts at foil to him to know just how sharp his reflexes were.   His opponent's fluted, bias-cut, floor-length crepe-de-chine was probably roughly the handicap he needed to get out of this with tolerable dignity, he considered, which rather hashed dignity before it had begun.

Ralph spun round and seized Hugh's arms above the elbows; he tensed for a struggle before he saw that he was staggering, incapable with laughter.  He returned the embrace and they lumbered about the study, wheezing hysterically.

‘Such stuff as dreams are made on―’

‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I―’

‘I’ll―I’ll break my staff―’

‘If thou dost break her virgin knot before―’

‘All sanct-i-mon-i-ous cer-e-mon-eeeees―oh Jesus Christ,’  Ralph squealed in a deliriously lyrical countertenor, seeing the small, miserably hunched shadow against the half-drawn curtain. ‘O―O―O―O―dell.’

Hugh’s eyes bulged, and he snorted and spluttered. ‘Let me get you out of this, quick.’  This time it didn’t seem to matter that he touched Ralph’s back as he unclipped the gown; there was companionable warmth in it, though the exposed skin itself was unexpectedly cool, slightly damp.

It seemed to take a geological age for Ralph to dress, though given that the dormitory average was three-and-a-half minutes and Ralph usually held the stopwatch, the Holocene was probably not quite outrun before he was shrugging into his jacket and straightening his tie: he looked unmeritedly neat, his fine, dirty-straw hair only minutely disordered in a way which afforded appeal to his hard face rather than detracting from it.  Hugh started towards the window, but Ralph put out an arm, holding him back as if he were a yokel about to walk into Piccadilly Circus traffic.  Ralph set aside the curtain without drawing it, opened and leaned out of the window.  Hugh could hear only a murmur almost seductive in timbre, then Odell’s piped, ‘Yes, please Lanyon, thank you, Lanyon.’

Ralph pulled the curtain and turned gracefully on the ball of his foot, looking abstractedly pleased.  Through the window, Hugh saw Odell’s compact form scrambling into the early evening mirk.

‘You should have asked him in to give his opinion,’ he offered, to his own astonishment, something close to bitterly.

‘Mm. What?’

‘He’ll see it in rehearsal soon enough, I suppose.’

‘What _are_ you on about, Hugh?’

‘Odell.  Didn’t I mention?  He’s playing Iris.’

Lanyon surveyed him inexpressively, shook his head and smiled superficially.  The year they had to share this study opened before them like a doubtful stretch of sea.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from _The Tempest_ , IV, i.; Stephano and Trinculo have become distracted from their plan to murder Prospero and usurp his magic by a clothes-line full of brightly-coloured garments. Trinculo: 'Do, do: we steal by line and level, an't like your grace.' 
> 
> The 'masque' discussed in this story is an illusion conjured by Prospero earlier in the same act to celebrate the betrothal of Ferdinand and Miranda, and features the goddesses Juno, Iris and Ceres.
> 
> 'it was the convention that one addressed the boys with whom one shared a study by their Christian names': there's some canonical evidence against this notion, of course, in Laurie's never thinking of Carter or Harris by theirs, but Ralph does refer to Treviss as 'Hugh' in canon, and it appealed to me, being a bit of a sucker for play with given names and surnames in school fiction.


End file.
